Bessette/Pitney’s AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: DELIBERATION, DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP reviews the idea of "deliberative democracy." Building on the book, this blog offers insights, analysis, and facts about recent events.

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Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Medicaid

Front-page stories hailed the bigger, more controversial part of the law that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that July day in 1965 — health insurance for elderly people, or Medicare, which the American Medical Association had bitterly denounced as socialized medicine. The New York Times did not even mention Medicaid, conceived as a small program to cover poor people’s medical bills.

But over the past five decades, Medicaid has surpassed Medicare in the number of Americans it covers. It has grown gradually into a behemoth that provides for the medical needs of one in five Americans — 74 million people — starting for many in the womb, and for others, ending only when they go to their graves.

...[L]ast week’s defeat reflected how hard it is to take away an entitlement. It also showed the broad and deep reach of Medicaid, which covers about six times as many people as the private marketplaces created under the A.C.A. but, perhaps because the markets are more strongly associated with President Barack Obama and his law, got less attention in this month’s contentious debate.

...

The program is so woven into the nation’s fabric that in 2015, almost two thirds of Americans in a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they were either covered by Medicaid or had a family member or friend who was. The program not only pays for 16 percent of all personal health care spending nationwide, but also accounts for 9 percent of federal domestic spending.

Because it has always covered a patchwork of groups — and many of its beneficiaries are poor and relatively powerless — Medicaid lacks the unified, formidable political constituency that Social Security and Medicare have. States often have different names for the program, and many who rely on it don’t realize that MassHealth in Massachusetts or TennCare in Tennessee are just Medicaid by another name.

But in Kaiser’s polling since 2005, the percentage of people who support cutting Medicaid spending has never exceeded 13 percent. “The conventional wisdom that there’s a great deal of stigma attached to this program does not bear out in the public opinion data,” said Mollyann Brodie, who oversees polling for the foundation.